Title: Jewish-American Writing, From Ethnicity to Mainstream
Abstract: Jewish American literature is one of the earliest ethnic projects that developed in the 1950s and opened the way for other ethnic literatures in the United States to enter the American mainstream. It loosened up the literary canon and created a more liberal atmosphere in which American literature began to be taught at American universities. The success of Jewish American literature shifted the focus of American literature from an emphasis on purely Eurocentric classics to global and polyglot writings in translation. Most Jewish American writers cashed on their immigrant experience and, taking advantage of grand historical totalities fashionable in the 1930s, connected their persecuted Jewish past with their difficult disaporic present. They put their Yiddishkeit memories and Talmud studies to good use and created an intellectual culture of professionalism and self-realization. They entered American state universities and by virtue of their hard work and scholarship succeeded. But in their success lay the seeds of their literary downfall. Beginning as rebels they gradually became conservative and espoused imperialist and Jewish-American Writing, From Ethnicity to Mainstream
Publication Year: 2015
Publication Date: 2015-05-02
Language: en
Type: article
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